Photograph by André Viking / Connected Archives
WORDS BY JASON P. DINH
Content warning: This article contains mentions of sexual violence.
Four years ago, Zainab Salbi was living a picture-perfect life. She had her own television show. She just published her fourth book. Her romantic life was going well. “Check, check, check,” she said. But then suddenly, she fell ill.
“It was like a day in a movie scene, and there was one moment in which my body started convulsing on its own. I believed that this was it. That I was dying,” she told me.
The mysterious illness took a yearslong toll. “I lost my cognitive ability. It was very hard for me to speak. It was very hard for me to write. And it was extremely hard for me to hear any sound of machines, cars included. So I had to leave New York City,” Salbi said.
She moved to a log cabin in the New York countryside, nothing but woods as far as the eye could see. There, perhaps unexpectedly, the lifelong city girl formed a profound connection with nature. Without it, she says quite literally, she’s not sure she would still be alive.
“I felt the trees were like, You can do it. You can do it, sister,” she said. “Nature became my best friend. I don’t know how to tell you that it was a spiritual experience.”
Salbi, now recovered, retold the story on a video call from Los Angeles, where she was visiting a sick friend. She sported a pair of round, amber-tinted glasses as sunbeams burst through the palm leaves and into the windows behind her. She was just a hair late, but understandably so—she joined right after a meeting with Sylvia Earle, the famed ocean conservationist. It was related to Salbi’s latest endeavor: an environmental philanthropy organization called Daughters for Earth, which finds, funds, and celebrates women-led climate solutions.
To Salbi, this work is something like a thank-you note. “I encountered my brush with death—and that changed everything in my life,” she said.
“I owe it to Mother Earth to thank it for saving me. And I will do everything I know in my skills to thank it… This is my vow.”
Salbi grew up in Baghdad, Iraq. She remembers a happy childhood, at least for the first 10 years of her life. A loving family. Music and dancing. A lush garden with towering fruit trees.
But in 1979, things changed: Saddam Hussein ascended to the nation’s presidency.
“I realized that he’s actually a friend of my family, and that my father was his commercial pilot and was made the head of the Iraqi Civil Aviation,” Salbi said.
“I owe it to Mother Earth to thank it for saving me. And I will do everything I know in my skills to thank it… This is my vow.”
There was no false sense of security within Hussein’s inner circle. “Being the friend of the dictator meant that you are that close to danger,” she said. That fear only intensified the next year when Iraq went to war with Iran. At one point, things got so dire that her family debated sleeping in the same room: If a bomb fell, at least they would all die together.
It was in war that Salbi first began viewing the world through the lens of women. “I remember watching the news once as a kid and I was like, Oh, the news talks only about war from men’s perspective, how men fight it and negotiate it… No one sees what women do in war, basically—which is keep life going,” she said. They were the teachers, doctors, nurses, police, and factory workers. “Everyone in the backline discussion was a woman.”
Perhaps the most influential woman was her mother, the first feminist in Salbi’s life. A working biology teacher, she preached about being financially independent, about refusing to be touched, talked to, or treated the wrong way. Tears welled in Salbi’s eyes as she regaled me with stories of her mother, who has since passed away from Lou Gehrig’s disease.
When Salbi was young, her mom handed her money to give to the poor; each Friday, she cooked meals for the local mosque to feed the hungry; twice a year, she asked Salbi to donate the clothes that she no longer wore. “She taught me to be a humanitarian,” she said. “Imagine we are living so close to Saddam, so we are in fear of the dictator… and then I have a mother that was the beacon of hope.”
You can imagine the shock, then, when Salbi’s mother sent her off to America, in an arranged marriage with a man she barely knew. Years later, when her mother was on her deathbed, she explained that she did it to distance her daughter from Hussein. It was an act of love. But at the time, the decision angered Salbi—not the least because the marriage was abusive.
Salbi left her husband within three months, carrying only $400 in her pocket. She couldn’t return home; Iraq just invaded Kuwait, and the U.S. soon got involved. She found herself working in a department store, selling clothes and Hallmark cards. Then, another war broke out: this time, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. That kicked off the next chapter of her life.
“I did not know what this country was. Never heard of it before,” she said. But what she knew all too well—too personally—was the cruelty that women face in war. “There were rape camps. There were concentration camps. I’m someone who lived in oppression and in a country that did not have freedom of expression.”
“In Iraq, I knew during Saddam’s time about the injustices that were being committed. I was just too scared to speak about them because you endanger your entire family,” she said. “But I don’t have that reason in America.”
According to a 2019 report, a paltry 0.2% of climate-related foundation funding goes explicitly to women in the environment.
Desperate to help, she founded Women for Women International at just 23 years old. “The premise,” she explained, “is to give women, for whom war destroyed everything in their lives, cash to start with.” Donors send a small amount of money, along with letters and photos, to a woman that they sponsor. The survivors also enroll in a yearlong vocational and educational class. In many ways, this was a manifestation of her mother’s teachings: of standing up against misogynistic wrongdoing and fighting for the dignity of financial independence.
In 1993, Women for Women funded 33 women survivors of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Today, the organization has distributed over $150 million to half a million women across 16 countries.
Salbi stepped away after 20 years leading the nonprofit—in part because she wanted to abdicate power voluntarily, just as she demanded dictators do. She continued fighting for women, this time as a storyteller and talk show host casting the world through a female lens. “I do believe we do miss out on understanding any story—whether it is war or peace, whether it is science, whether it is climate—if we are excluding 50% of the population,” she said. Eventually, she was dubbed the Oprah of the Arab World.
“And then a turning point happened in my life—which is I almost died.”
Salbi likens Daughters for Earth to the grand finale of a show: “I’m going to give it my all. This is going to be my biggest third act,” she said.
She sees clear parallels between her current and past work. “[Women in climate] are impacted the most. They keep life going. They don’t get funding. And they don’t get acknowledged,” she said. According to a 2019 report, a paltry 0.2% of climate-related foundation funding goes explicitly to women in the environment. “It’s exactly the same story as I worked in war.”
And although she’s less familiar with climate science, she’s developed a network of experts. Daughters for Earth follows priorities set by One Earth: to protect 50% of the world’s land and seas, shift to regenerative agriculture, and deploy renewable energy. Salbi’s organization finds and funds women working in that roadmap.
As Daughters for Earth turns two this month, they’ve already distributed $2.4 million to 102 women-led efforts in 37 countries—a sizeable step toward their $100 million goal. They’ve also created graphic novels that highlight the work of their grant recipients. The objective, Salbi said, is to celebrate these women and equip others with resources to be part of the solution.
“When it comes to protecting the Earth, women do not need to be empowered. They are in their full power.”
Some might describe this as women’s empowerment, but not Salbi.
“When it comes to protecting the Earth, women do not need to be empowered. They are in their full power,” Salbi said. “What they need is for their power to be funded, supported, celebrated, and respected—to be included at the decision-making table.”
Salbi’s latest work has led to personal growth and healing, too. She told me that when she thought she was dying, she regretted not living more kindly to herself and others. She didn’t even know what a kind life looked like, but she learned as she reconnected with Earth.
Nature taught Salbi to live more slowly, with care and intentionality. In some ways, that’s a full-circle revelation. These are ideas her mother seeded long ago but have since gone dormant in America. She recalled, for instance, a persimmon tree in her childhood garden. Her mother instructed her that the fruits were ready to pick once the birds started pecking. When her friend suggested a newfangled “automatic garden” to accelerate the ripening process, her mother quipped, There’s no such thing. You’ve just got to care for it.
Much like her family did that persimmon tree, Salbi has learned to invest time into caring for herself. From her log cabin, Salbi hikes, meditates, and checks in with her heart daily. She carves out time to spend with her friends and family, living that out as she spoke to me from her sick friend’s home in Los Angeles. And like the plants in her garden, slowness and kindness are now bearing fruit.
When I asked if she would think differently about living a kind life if she died today, she assured me, “Definitely.”
“I could only learn [these lessons] when I slowed down, and I could only learn them because nature taught me,” she said.
As for the persimmon tree, life has anything but slowed down. After Salbi’s family moved, her childhood home was turned into an execution center, a brothel, and then a military base. It’s unrecognizable, said Salbi. Everything in the garden has died—except for the persimmon tree, which still stands tall to this day.
As Salbi left our call, I couldn’t help but wonder how that tree is doing. Does it still fruit? Do the birds still visit? After witnessing so much horror, Salbi finally found a life of kindness. Doesn’t nature deserve that happy ending, too?
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Out of Saddam Hussein’s Shadow and Into the Climate Frontline
